In Jackson Heights at Real Art Ways

In the course of his brilliant, nearly half-century career, Frederick Wiseman has tackled both great social institutions (a prison for the criminally insane, high school, military, police, juvenile court, the welfare system) and cultural ones (La Comédie Franҫaise, the Paris Opéra Ballet, American Ballet Theater, London’s National Gallery). With IN JACKSON HEIGHTS he profiles one of New York’s most diverse neighborhoods, with immigrants from Peru, Colombia, Mexico, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan (167 languages are spoken) — as well as elderly residents of Jewish, Irish and Italian extraction. Under the elevated train, a hodge-podge of stores sell whole baby goats, saris, and Bollywood DVDs; they offer HIV testing, Tibetan food, and classes for would-be cabbies. Jackson Heights is home to an activist LGBT community, to recent survivors of terrifying border crossings, students of the Quran, and small shop-owners who mobilize against the Williamsburg-ization of the neighborhood. Wiseman embraces a community that revels in still being affordable, 20 minutes from “the city,” and resolutely unhip.  

Nominated for Best Animated Feature – 2016 Academy Awards

A kaleidoscopic journey through Brazil’s colorful jungles and fields, towering cities, and mechanized factories, Boy and the World is a feat of imagination and creative skill. Relying on imagery and the infusion of Brazilian hip-hop, samba, and traditional folk music more than any dialogue, Boy and the World takes children and adults on a journey through a richly imagined landscape. Cuca’s cozy rural life changes when his father leaves for the city, prompting him to embark on a quest to reunite his family. The young boy’s journey unfolds like a tapestry, the animation taking on greater complexity as his small world expands. Animal-machines, barrios of decoupage streets and shop windows, and flashing neon advertisements that illuminate the night make up the ever-changing stages of his journey. The story is a “contemporary allegory and an ancient fable,” showing the hazards of a changing world through the eyes of a curious child.

Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Amy Berg (Deliver Us from Evil) delves into the life of late rock legend Janis Joplin.

Internationally-celebrated chef René Redzepi has won Best Restaurant in the World four times for his Copenhagen-based restaurant Noma. Working from the concept of time and place, Redzepi and his team create region-specific food from local products that put Nordic cuisine on the map. Redzepi’s genius crosses with his sometimes abrasive style as the Noma team push for another win in the high-stakes game of international restaurant competition.

It’s 1957 in the small town of Rockwell, Maine. Hogarth Hughes is just a normal nine-year-old boy: headstrong and imaginative, always on the lookout for adventure. When Hogarth overhears a tall tale about a giant metal man falling into the sea, Hogarth sets out exploring to find the enormous robot. What he finds is a 50-foot giant with an insatiable appetite for metal and a childlike curiosity about its new world. As rumors fly about everything from an alien invasion to a Russian secret weapon, the paranoia of the town escalates and the possible destruction of Rockwell looms. Hogarth turns to his friend, the Iron Giant, who ultimately finds its humanity by unselfishly saving the town.

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From Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Starring Jennifer Aniston (voice of Annie Hughes) and Christopher McDonald (voice of Kent Mansley). When “The Iron Giant” arrived in theaters in 1999, it was hailed as an “instant classic” by Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal and the world soon learned another “giant” had arrived as well: filmmaker Brad Bird, who made his stunning directorial debut with this film and has gone on to win two Oscars, as well as worldwide acclaim for his work on both animated and live-action features. This is the remastered version of the 1999 classic, featuring two all new scenes and a special video intro from director Brad Bird.

There is a stream that courses through American roots music. Its source is in the Appalachian foothills in a place called Maces Springs, Virginia. It was there that the Original Carter Family (A.P. Carter, his wife Sara and his sister-in-law Maybelle) began their careers as three of the earliest stars of country music. These three didn’t just play the music emerging from their hill country upbringing. They helped invent it. A.P. was both song collector and composer, crafting and arranging snippets of ancient, musty melodies into commercial American popular music. Maybelle took the then-underplayed guitar and made it into the cornerstone of country instrumentation that we know today. And Sara became the first well-known woman’s voice in country music, stamping it with the eerie Gothic quality we find in so much of the country canon. THE WINDING STREAM tells the story of the Carter Family and its legacy. The film blends studio and live performances by country music royalty like George Jones, Rosanne Cash, and Sheryl Crow, and also features priceless, late-life scenes and interviews with June and Johnny Cash. *Stay after Friday, December 18 screening for a Q&A with Director Beth Harrington. **Stay after Saturday, December 19 screening for an informal, open, acoustic, bluegrass jam in the Real Art Ways’ lounge!

A young boy must use his intuition, nascent survival skills, and the wisdom of his father to outwit potential enemies in a cross-desert trek set in the inhospitable Hijaz wilderness. Theeb (meaning Wolf) is a Bedouin boy in a time when his culture and way of life were radically changing. Pilgrim guides like Theeb and his brother Hussein were being replaced by railroads running all the way to Mecca. Director Abu Nowar’s “impressive” debut feature places the real history of a region at the heart of a “classic adventure tale of the best kind.” (Variety)

An offline celebration of the internet of felines! We’re bringing the 2015 Internet Cat Video Festival to our cinema with a brand-new reel of over 100 videos, culled from nominations by the public in the categories of Comedy, Drama, Animated, Musical, Action, Vintage, and Documentary and curated by Will Braden, creator of the “Henri Le Chat Noir” videos and recipient of the fest’s first Golden Kitty (people’s choice) award. Film critic Roger Ebert called “Henri 2, Paw De Deux” “the best Internet cat video ever made.” The Internet Cat Video festival is hosted live by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but you don’t have to go that far to see funny cats. We’ll have the videos for two weekends, starting after Thanksgiving.

Yale University, 1961. Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) designs a psychology experiment that remains relevant to this day, in which people think they’re delivering painful electric shocks to an affable stranger (Jim Gaffigan) strapped into a chair in another room. Disregarding his pleas for mercy, the majority of subjects do not stop the experiment, administering what they think are near-fatal electric shocks, simply because they’ve been told to. With Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial airing in living rooms across America, Milgram’s exploration of authority and conformity strikes a nerve in popular culture and the scientific community.

In 2011, renowned mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary artist Laurie Anderson — whose eclectic career spans music, drawing, storytelling, performance, and more — suffered the loss of her beloved rat terrier Lolabelle as part of a succession of family deaths that also included her mother and her husband, legendary musician Lou Reed. In this strikingly personal essay film, Anderson uses her close bond with Lolabelle to anchor her reflections on subjects as diverse as family memories, surveillance, and Buddhist teachings, with her own melodic voiceover narration overlaying a complex tapestry of images (including Anderson’s own animations, 8mm home-movie footage, and lots of lovingly photographed dogs). Heart of a Dog is dreamy, comic, philosophical and intensely emotional — like Anderson herself, it defies easy categorization.

Ane’s life takes a turn when a bouquet of flowers is delivered to her house every week. Always at the same time and always anonymously. Lourdes and Tere’s lives are also affected by some mysterious flowers. A stranger leaves a weekly bouquet in memory of someone important in their lives. This is the story of three women, three lives altered by the mere presence of bouquets of flowers. Flowers that will make feelings blossom inside them that had seemed long forgotten… But in the end, they are nothing more than flowers.

Marshland is set in 1980 Spain’s deep south, just after the end of Franco’s brutal dictatorship. In a small village frozen in time – surrounded by a labyrinth of marshlands and rice paddies – a serial killer has taken residence and caused the disappearance of several adolescents that no one seems to have missed. When two young sisters disappear during an annual festival, their mother forces an investigation that brings two homicide detectives from Madrid to try and solve the mystery.

Director Alice Rohrwacher’s richly textured sophomore feature centers on a family of beekeepers living in stark isolation in central Italy. The dynamic of their overcrowded household is disrupted by the simultaneous arrival of a silently troubled teenaged boy taken in as a farmhand, and a production crew recruiting local farmers to participate in a cheesy televised celebration of ancient Etruscan culture presented by the mysterious Milly Catena (Monica Bellucci). Both intrusions are of particular interest to the eldest daughter, Gelsomina, who is struggling to find her footing in the world, and Rohrwacher manages to convey her adolescent sense of wonder and confusion with characteristically graceful naturalism.

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WINNER OF THE GRAND PRIX at the Cannes Film Festival 2014 Starring Monica Bellucci, Alba Rohrwacher, and Maria Alexandra Lungu.

Three hours outside of Addis Ababa, a bright 14-year-old girl is on her way home from school when men on horses swoop in and kidnap her. The brave Hirut grabs a rifle and tries to escape, but ends up shooting her would-be husband. In her village, the practice of abduction into marriage is common and one of Ethiopia’s oldest traditions. Meaza Ashenafi, an empowered and tenacious young lawyer, arrives from the city to represent Hirut and argue that she acted in self-defense. Meaza boldly embarks on a collision course between enforcing civil authority and abiding by customary law, risking the ongoing work of her women’s legal-aid practice to save Hirut’s life.

Hannah and Tahir (Jennifer Connelly, Anthony Mackie) come from two different worlds. But when their lives intersect, they’re at the same place: homeless on the streets of New York. How did they get there? As we learn about their past, we begin to understand that to have a future, they need each other. There are more than 50,000 homeless people living on the streets and in the shelters of New York City. To most of us they are nameless and faceless, and occasionally a nuisance. But every single person has a story. And Hannah and Tahir are no different. And theirs is a story of loss, love, hope and redemption.

When nutritional scientist and author T. Colin Campbell inspires Kentucky State Representative Tom Riner to propose a pilot program documenting the health benefits of a plant-based diet, they inadvertently set in motion a series of events that expose powerful forces opposed to the diet. When industry lobbyists kill the pilot program, Dr. Campbell’s oldest son Nelson decides to try his own grassroots approach in his hometown of Mebane, North Carolina.

Starring Kristen Wiig, Sebastian Silva, and Tunde Adebimpe. The film centers on a Brooklyn couple, Freddy (Silva) and his boyfriend Mo (Adebimpe), who are trying to have a baby with the help of their best friend, Polly (Wiig). The film follows the trio as they navigate the idea of creating life while confronted by growing harassment from a menacing local known as ‘The Bishop.’ As things take a dark turn, their joyous pursuit of parenthood is suddenly clouded.